The present invention relates to Internet telephony, and more particularly to an improved end-user interface for Internet-protocol (IP) telephone communication.
Today, Internet telephony is an emerging competitor to conventional telephony as long distance calls are carried over the global Internet at relatively low cost. Additionally, although present Internet telephony systems provide comparably poor quality of service, future improvements will undoubtedly provide signal quality at least on the order of that provided by conventional systems.
Available IP telephones consist primarily of a multimedia personal computer (PC) running a software telephony application which translates end-user sound signals into appropriately formatted digital signals for transfer over a computer network (e.g., the global Internet), and vice versa. Typically, such a multimedia PC includes a sound card with a microphone and a speaker for speech input and output, and accesses the computer network through an appropriate network interface, such as a public switched telephone network (PSTN), a wireless network, or a public or private data network. The software telephony application compresses and decompresses end-user speech signals in order to decrease bandwidth requirements for computer network transmissions. Thus, speech coding and decoding is typically carried out by a central processing unit (CPU) in the multimedia PC. The precise type of speech coding used (e.g., GSM, D-AMPS, etc.) depends upon the bit-rate and speech quality requirements for a given application. Compressed sound signals are transmitted over the computer network using an appropriate UDP/IP network protocol, as is well known in the art. As with speech coding and decoding, the computer network protocol is conventionally administered by the software telephony application running on the multimedia PC.
Despite the above described benefits, the IP telephone of today has several disadvantages as compared to a conventional telephone. For example, common speech coding and decoding algorithms require high performance PCs including relatively fast CPUs. Additionally, the conventional IP-telephone application requires extra sound equipment, such as a sound card and microphone, which is not often included in a standard consumer PC package.
Thus, the conventional IP telephone consists of a relatively high-end PC which is high-priced, power-hungry, and over-sized as compared to a conventional telephone. Additionally, the PC is normally switched off and requires a relatively long and inconvenient boot-up time. Furthermore, even a fully equipped PC does not normally include a comfortable end-user telephone handset, and the relative distance between the PC microphone and PC speaker can cause disturbing echoes for system users. Thus, there is a real need for an improved IP telephone.